"Is this the sort of thing you were-?"
"Beatrice, could I possibly read that for myself, to make notes on it?"
"You can't take it out of the office.”
“Perhaps I could perch at the corner of your table. Would I be terribly in your way?”
“I suppose not, no," said Beatrice. "You could have that chair if I lifted that heap of books off it-"
"Let me do that-"
"And you could sit opposite me then, if I cleaned that corner of my table-"
"So I could. Thank you."
They were engaged in space clearing when Mortimer Cropper appeared in the doorway, making everything appear dingier in comparison to his suave elegance. "Miss Nest. How pleasant to see you again. I trust I'm not too early. I could always come back again…"
Beatrice was flustered. A heap of papers sighed sideways and fanned out on the floor. "Oh dear. I was ready, Professor, I was quite ready, only Mr Michell wanted to enquire… wanted to know… " Cropper had detached Miss Nest's shapeless mackintosh from its hook and was holding it for her. "Glad to see you, Michell. Making progress? What did you want to know?"
His clearcut face was composed of pure curiosity.
"Just checking on Ash's reading of some poems."
"Ah yes. Which poems?"
"Roland was enquiring about Christabel LaMotte. I couldn't remember anything… but there turned out to be a minor reference… you may sit there whilst I have lunch with Professor Cropper, Roland, if you try not to disturb the order of things on my desk, if you promise not to take anything out of here…"
"You need help, Miss Nest. Your task is too huge."
"Oh no. I do much better alone. I should not know what to do with help."
"Christabel LaMotte," said Cropper, musing. "There's a photograph in the Stant Collection. Very pale. Not sure if it was the effect of near-albinism or a defect in the printing. Probably the latter. Was Ash, do you think, interested in her?"
"Only very marginally. I'm just checking. Routinely."
When Cropper had shepherded his charge out, Roland settled at his table corner and turned the pages of Randolph Ash's wife's journal.
Still engaged in reading Melusina. An impressive achievement.
Have reached Book VI of Melusina. Its aspirations to cosmic reflection might be thought to sit uneasily with its Fairytale nature.
Still reading Melusina. What diligence, what confidence went to its contriving. Miss LaMotte despite a lifetime's residence in this country, remains essentially French in her way of seeing the world. Though there is nothing to which one can take exception in this beautiful and daring poem, in its morals indeed.
And then, several pages later, a surprising and uncharacteristic outburst.
Today I laid down Melusina having come trembling to the end of this marvellous work. What shall I say of it? It is truly original, although the general public may have trouble in recognising its genius, because it makes no concession to vulgar frailties of imagination, and because its virtues are so far removed in some ways at least from those expected of the weaker sex. Here is no swooning sentiment, no timid purity, no softly gloved lady-like patting of the reader's sensibility, but lively imagination, but force and vigour. How shall I characterise it? It is like a huge, intricately embroidered tapestry in a shadowed stone hall, on which all sorts of strange birds and beasts and elves and demons creep in and out of thickets of thorny trees and occasional blossoming glades. Fine patches of gold stand out in the gloom, sunlight and starlight, the sparkle of jewels or human hair or serpents' scales. Firelight flickers, fountains catch light. All the elements are in perpetual motion, fire consuming, water running, air alive and the earth turning… I was put in mind of the tapestried hunts in The Franklin's Tale or in The Faerie Queene, where the observer sees the woven vision come alive under his wondering eyes, so that pictured swords draw real blood, and the wind sighs in pictured trees.
And what shall I say of the scene in which the husband, a man of insufficient faith, bores his peephole and observes his Siren-spouse at play in her vat of waters? I should have said, if I was asked, that this scene was best left to the imagination, as Coleridge left Géraldine-"a sight to dream of, not to tell." But Miss LaMotte tells abundantly, though her description might be a little strong for some stomachs, especially maidenly English ones, who will be looking for fairy winsomeness.
She is beautiful and terrible and tragic, the Fairy Melusina, inhuman in the last resort.
The sinuous muscle of her monster tail
Beating the lambent bath to diamond-fine
Refracting lines of spray, a dancing veil
Of heavier water on the breathless air
How lovely-white her skin her Lord well knew,
The tracery of blue veins across the snow…
But could not see the beauty in the sheen
Of argent scale and slate-blue coiling fin…
Perhaps the most surprising touch is that the snake or fish is beautiful.
Roland gave up any idea of having lunch himself to copy out this passage, mostly because he wanted to give it to Maud Bailey, who must be excited at this contemporary female enthusiasm for her admired text, but also because he felt that extravagant admiration of this sort, from Ash's wife for a woman whom he was already thinking of as Ash's mistress, was perhaps unexpected. Having copied it out, he turned the pages idly.
My recent reading has caused me for some reason to remember myself as I was when a young girl, reading high Romances and seeing myself simultaneously as the object of all knights' devotion-an unspotted Guenevere-and as the author of the Tale. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, but the mistress of a very small household, consisting of an elderly poet (set in his ways, which are amiable and gentle and give no cause for anxiety), myself, and the servants who are not unmanageable. I see daily how Patience and Faith are both worn down and hagged with the daily care of their broods and yet shine with the flow of love and unstinted concern for their young. They are now grandmothers as well as mothers, doted on and doting. I myself have come to find of late a kind of creeping insidious vigour come upon me (after the unspeakable years of migraine headache and nervous prostration). I wake feeling, indeed, rather spry, and look about for things to occupy myself with. I remember at sixty the lively ambitions of the young girl in the Deanery, who seems like someone else, as I watch her in my imagination dancing in her moony muslin, or having her hand kissed by a gentleman in a boat.
I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet abut the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But I now think-it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet? I could never write as well as Randolph, but then no one can or could, and so it was perhaps not worth considering as an objection to doing something.
Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated, I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on. Randolph, if he were to read this, would laugh me out of such morbid questioning, would tell me it is never too late, would cram his huge imagination into the snail-shell space of my tiny new accession of energy and tell me what is to be done. But he shan't see this, and I will find a way-to be a very little more there now I'm crying, as that girl might have cried. Enough.